A Reinforcement Learning Badminton Environment for Simulating Player Tactics

Abstract

Recent techniques for analyzing sports precisely has stimulated various approaches to improve player performance and fan engagement. However, existing approaches are only able to evaluate offline performance since testing in real-time matches requires exhaustive costs and cannot be replicated. To test in a safe and reproducible simulator, we focus on turn-based sports and introduce a badminton environment by simulating rallies with different angles of view and designing the states, actions, and training procedures. This benefits not only coaches and players by simulating past matches for tactic investigation, but also researchers from rapidly evaluating their novel algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/wywyWang/CoachAIProjects/tree/main/Strategic%20Environment.